Links
Kagi is a paid search engine. Unlike free (gratis) search engines, it’s not funded through advertisements. Thus, it can be argued that it has fewer conflicts of interest in providing users with quality search results.
I signed up for Kagi in December 2021. I’ve used it on and off for a while. I started actually paying for Kagi in March 2024.
The reason I started paying was that I became frustrated with SEO’d ad-ridden results on Google and even DuckDuckGo, without much ability to block annoying sites. (I have tried using uBlock Origin to apply custom CSS, but it’s a fragile approach that breaks when Google updates their CSS.)
Features include:
- Ability to block or raise certain domains (goodbye Pinterest and geeksforgeeks, hello MDN)
- Kagi will show you how many advertisements were detected on a page
- You can apply custom CSS to search results
- You can actually view the URL in the search results (minus the http/https scheme)
- Really, you have a lot of options in the settings page (https://kagi.com/settings?p=search).
Antifeatures it excludes:
-
It doesn’t overwrite the URL with a tracking link.
(Google will overwrite the link occasionally, which breaks
:visitedCSS for me sometimes) - It doesn’t have sponsored ads that appear like organic search results.
I like that you can also search the “small web” and have individuals’ websites appear.
Lenses
Lenses are a way for you to control how search results are ordered. I think it’s similar to “goggles” in Brave Search (which I haven’t used, but I did read the whitepaper about them).
I haven’t made my own lenses yet.
Bangs
Again, see How to use bangs.
| Bang | Where it goes |
|---|---|
!sum url |
Summarize a URL |
!fgpt query |
FastGPT |
!v |
Kagi Videos |
!i |
Kagi Images |
!m |
Kagi Maps |
Custom bangs
See custom bangs settings. I have some custom bangs set for:
- An Invidious instance
- Marginalia search (
https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=%s) - Fatcat (
https://fatcat.wiki/release/search?q=%s&generic=1) - Patent PDFs (
https://ppubs.uspto.gov/dirsearch-public/print/downloadPdf/%s) - USA government (
https://search.usa.gov/search?affiliate=usagov_all_gov&query=%s)
Redirects
Lets you rewrite urls.
Like reddit.com to old.reddit.com (or even a libreddit or teddit instance, if those still work).
Here’s some redirect examples:
^https://reddit.com|https://old.reddit.com(this is the default example on the doc page, but a good demo)^https://([a-zA-Z0-9]+).fandom.com/(.+)|https://farside.link/breezewiki/$1/$2(Fandom has a lot of info, but a lot of ads)
Miscellaneous tips
- You need to sign in to use Kagi. I keep a link with a session token on my own personal startpage so I can quickly log in.